(no subject)

[prog]

Heh heh, pages upon pages of people going No... NO! Aaaaaagh you're all wrong shut up about the .999... thing. This is worse/more amusing than the time that the Monty Hall problem was AOTD.

I find it interesting that the text of the article actually predicts the belief-path the doubters take... when faced with simple and easily graspable proofs, they change their minds and state that obviously this means that the number system is broken.

Comments

[dictator555.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry you think I'm playing silly semantic games. It's actually an important philosophical distinction for me. I probably should have just talked to Jason offline about it, because I didn't mean to insult anybody with my "silliness".

Yes. My understanding of mathematics is inconsistent, or at least fairly uneducated. It's been a long time since I took calculus in high school, and as I said, I've managed to forget most of what I learned.

I was hardly attacking math. I admitted how useful it is. My point was that I don't believe in it because I don't think it represents reality. If I don't believe in infinity, the whole concept of .999... becomes meaningless. That's inconsistent with math, but it's not internally inconsistent with my own belief system. It's not my understanding that's lacking (although certainly there's some of that) but rather my agreement with some of the basic assumptions that mathematics relies on. So what if math is internally consistent? That doesn't make it right, just useful.

But it's just my opinion, dude, and seriously not that important. Try not to let my disbelief bother you too much.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

Oh, it really doesn't *bother* me as such. I'm certainly not insulted, and I hope you are not either. I simply find your position on mathematics surprising and it makes for an interesting discussion. I hope I didn't come across too combative!

[dictator555.livejournal.com]

You did kind of come off as combative, or maybe I was just being sensitive. Sorry if I over-reacted and was combative back. I'm glad we're bringing this back down to the level of interesting discussion. :)

[daerr.livejournal.com]

If you don't believe in 0.999... then the concept of 1=0.999... can't be expressed, no? So it would seem impossible to even make a statement about 1=0.999... when using a system that doesn't have 0.999....

I suspect that there are important aspects of how we model the world that rely on infinite sequences (and that they be infinite and not just very very long). That is, that we can predict things about how the world behaves given the existence of the infinite that we wouldn't be able to do so otherwise. If this is true then that would point toward the idea of infinity as being real at some basic practical level, no? (I would assume that π would be an example of this, but I couldn't really say.)

[dictator555.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Exactly. 1=.999... is meaningless if you don't believe in .999...

I don't really know much about infinity. Are there solid scientific reasons for believing in it? I'm not sure that saying it's useful mathetmatically is a good argument for the existence of infinity, merely that it's a useful hypothetical idea. But again, I don't know a ton about it really.